Artist Statement – Zibeyda Seyidova

Zibeyda Seyidova’s practice is grounded in abstraction as a method of inquiry rather than representation. Working across oil painting and moving image, she constructs visual environments shaped by geometry, texture, light, and duration. Her work rejects figuration in favor of concentrated structures that invite sustained attention and slow perception. Rather than depicting the world, Seyidova’s practice explores how meaning emerges through form, rhythm, and material presence.

Geometry functions in her work as a conceptual framework. Lines, planes, and vertical axes establish spatial tensions and moments of balance, operating less as compositional devices than as propositions about order, orientation, and continuity. These elements form threshold-like spaces—neither symbolic nor narrative—through which the viewer encounters structure as experience. Her compositions resist resolution, remaining open and generative.

Materiality and temporality are central to this process. In painting, dense oil surfaces register accumulation, pressure, and trace, emphasizing the physical negotiation between gesture and control. In video works, restrained movement, subtle shifts in light, and extended duration introduce time as an active material. Across both media, matter is treated as dynamic rather than illustrative—holding tension between surface and depth, visibility and concealment.

Seyidova’s works operate as concentrated visual fields, deliberately structured through stillness, repetition, and restraint. Rejecting spectacle and immediacy, her practice establishes conditions for sustained attention, where silence, shadow, and pause function as active agents. Form is encountered not as image but as experience, unfolding through duration, rhythm, and the viewer’s own presence. Reduction here is not a limitation but a precise strategy for intensifying perception.

Through this approach, Seyidova aligns with traditions of abstraction that understand restraint as generative. Her work does not seek to explain or resolve, but to hold space for reflection and heightened awareness. Each painting and moving image functions as a site of concentration, where form, time, and perception converge—inviting the viewer into a quiet but insistent encounter with the act of seeing itself.